Of Friendship and Labor
by WickedRipePlum
Summary: Sark kicks some ass, takes some names, and hums a jaunty tune.Or...Long may our crimson flag inspire bang


Disclaimer: Certainly not mine!

Thanks to **auchic** for the beta.

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**Of Friendship and Labor**

Soyuz nerushimiy respublik svobodnykh  
Splotila naveki velikaya Rus'!  
Da zdravstvuet sozdanniy voley narodov  
Velikiy, moguchiy Sovetskiy Soyuz!

Sark was dressed for work. Black, of course. Clothes that clung to his skin, but were loose enough to allow free movement. Warm enough to allow him to wait silently on his perch for hours, but not warm enough that he ever got too comfortable. Not that it mattered; Sark was far too well trained to relax his concentration when so much was at stake. His sniper rifle was set up, but currently he was watching the meeting going on in the building across the street through high powered binoculars.  
  
Three days ago he had gotten word from a contact, the sometime mistress of Ivan Burakoff (who was far more clever than anyone gave her credit for), that Burakoff would be meeting Piotr Berdovsky here.  
  
Berdovsky's cartel controlled a profitable opium trade out of Afghanistan. In the past few months Berdovsky had started selling off his assets, the prostitutes in Moscow, the weapons trade to the Sudan. His professed reason-wanting to take his considerable wealth and return to his childhood home, Gomel, and live out what was left of his life surrounded by his children, grandchildren, and young American bride-struck Sark as a bit saccrin for a man of Berdovsky's legendary cruelty. Of course the reason, true or not, didn't matter.  
  
He would be dead within the hour.  
  
Eventually Burakoff stood up and nodded a curt goodbye. Sark put down his binoculars and grasped his rifle, training it on the single entrance of the old factory. There were no men standing guard on the street, which was just as well since it wouldn't have saved them, just made Sark's job slightly messier.  
  
He started tapping out the rhythm he learned as a child against the side of the trigger. By the time Burakoff's brother-in-law, a squirrelly Italian with a prominent chin, emerged from the building Sark was well into the chorus.  
  
_Long may our crimson flag inspire_  
  
Click  
  
And the world lost one unctuous coattail riding relative.  
  
_Shining in glory for all men to see_  
  
Click  
  
And a bodyguard with a thick mustache and beer belly went down.  
  
Burakoff had just enough time to shoot off his compact Glock harmlessly into the night before…  
  
_Though days dark and stormy_  
  
Click  
  
And blood started spread from the hole between his eyes.  
  
Sark wasn't overly concerned about cheating when two of Berdovsky's men, attracted by Burakoff's shot, came barreling out of the building, guns drawn.  
  
Click – click  
  
And they fell.  
  
There were three men left inside. Skrabiec, Berdovsky's weapons trade point man, Berdovsky himself, and Lordan, a large Pole with a never changing smirk plastered on his face.  
  
Twelve hours before Sark and Lordan had shared a drink in a hotel room above Minsk II while Sark offered him 13 million to lead his long time employer to the roof of the abandoned factory they were currently trapped in.  
  
Sark waited patiently for fifteen minutes before he saw movement on the roof. Lordan made a great show of proving they were out of danger, walking around the unprotected ledges near the street. Eventually Berdovsky and Skrabiec joined him.  
  
_United forever in friendship and labor_  
  
Click  
  
_Our mighty Republics will ever endure_  
  
Click  
  
And two of the most powerful criminals in Belarus met an untimely end.  
  
Lordan couldn't see him, but he nodded toward the ledge where he knew Sark must be. Then he turned and walked back towards the door. But after only three steps his knees buckled and his head hit the tar. His last thought as he slowly bled to death from the wound in his back was that he should never have trusted Sark. 

Slavsya Otechestvo nashe svobodnoye,  
Druzhbi narodov nadyozhniy oplot,  
Partiya Lenina, sila narodnaya  
Nas k torzhestvu kommunizma vedyot!

Some operatives despised wet work. Many of them mistook their naïve squeamishness for superior moral fiber. They advertised their weakness as if it made them better than everyone else, but it just gave too much information that could be used against them. And of course they were, every last one of them, hypocrites. Push them far enough to get through their squeamishness and you saw just how ironclad their morality was.  
  
Then there were those who took a maniacal joy in killing. Sark viewed this as equally unprofessional. Glee made you do stupid things. Killing too many or the wrong people always got you in trouble. After his indentured servitude to the Covenant and subsequent incarceration, Sark didn't need a reminder of that.  
  
Although he couldn't say he enjoyed it exactly, Sark thought that sniping was one of the most satisfying parts of his job. He liked the equipment. He remembered assembling and dismantling his first rifle over and over again, obsessively cleaning it and just staring at it wistfully in its black case. Now he took pleasure in the way the metal warmed to his touch as he huddled around on a cold rooftop.  
  
Sark loved the process. The detached cleanliness of a successful job, and most of all, the solitude. There was no need to assemble a team for this. No guards, no coms, just him.  
  
The killing itself was almost beside the point. Well, not beside the point, but it held no emotional impact for Sark. It never had, not from the first time, at the age of eight, when he'd watched someone slowly bleed to death as if it were a particularly interesting movie, and not now.  
  
Dr. Barnett had once asked Sark during his two years in CIA custody how he felt about murdering people. He had compared himself to the children of farmers. Suburban children might be horrified to see animals slaughtered, but that was just how it was done. That's how you made your money, that's how you got your food. There was nothing to feel guilty about. Nothing to regret, unless things didn't go your way. In his weakened state he hadn't been able to tell if this answer had disturbed the good doctor or not. He hoped it had.  
  
It was true though, he had been born and raised to this life, and very little about it bothered him. He had first held a gun at seven, and it hadn't been a little one that a child could easily handle, but the weight of the pistol in his hand had just felt right. Sark was a small child and not a particularly strong one, so he had to throw all his weight into bracing himself against the kickback when he shot, but he would practice for hours when given the chance.  
  
A few years later, after Irina had taken him out of school, he had his first experience with a sniper rifle.  
  
Irina showed him how to aim and shoot moving targets. She taught him how to stayed centered and focused. How to concentrate on a strong rhythm that would keep his hand steady. She would sing Gimn Sovetskovo Soyuza to him while tapping out the beats on his back like a deadly metronome. The choice was a practical one, not made out of patriotic feeling, which Irina had lost a long time ago, but because it was one of the few songs Sark was very familiar with.  
  
When she decided he was ready Irina had taken him to a building overlooking a Bombay marketplace. She lay next to him singing softly while he picked off morning shoppers. Seven minutes and eleven dead later, they escaped through the bedlam below. As they moved in the crowd she clung to him tightly as if she were a panicked mother with her young son. 

Skvoz tuchi siyalo nam solntse svobodi,  
I Lenin velikiy nam put' ozaril,  
Na pravoe delo on podnyal narodi,  
Na trud i na podvigi nas vdokhnovil!

Posing as a German businessman, Sark was given a desperate sort of respect by all the staff at his hotel. He gave off an unmistakable 'stay away from me' air, but his halting attempts at Belarusian earned him smiles. The middle-aged bartender with poorly bleached hair even laughed when he rolled his eyes behind the back of a British tourist who ordered a white russian.  
  
Later he went to a club to meet another contact who gave him new identity papers. He left with a blue haired university student named Valentina.  
  
She was still dead to the world when finished packing and checked out of the hotel. He paid for his stay, and an extra day for his friend, in cash. The clerk gave him a questioning look, but nodded in understanding when he caught sight of his wedding ring. It was a common enough occurrence in a hotel that catered to business travelers and men had to stick together.  
  
In the afternoon he flew to Berlin where he became an American tourist with jeans, a UMass sweatshirt, a Red Sox hat, and a dimpled grin that everyone found charming. He met an older man whose clothes reeked from years of chain smoking at a run down coffee shop and asked him if he had any information on the whereabouts of certain CIA operatives.  
  
Afterwards Sark took him out to the back alley where he shot him three times with his silenced gun and stole his wallet. He took the cash and his PDA, then dumped the rest of the wallet a couple blocks from the body.  
  
In a bathroom of a youth hostel he dyed his hair mousy brown to match the picture on yet another passport. Now he was Emile, a shy French boy traveling to the US for the first time to visit his uncle. He fumbled with his boarding pass and identification at the check in counter. The worker smiled comfortingly, but he was too nervous to lift his eyes. On the flight to West Palm he slept well for the first time in several days, despite the baby crying several rows behind him. He woke up refreshed and just brave enough to smile and wave at the flight attendants as he disembarked.  
  
Jack Bristow was waiting for him in a white Camry that had seen better days. Sark waved and yelled, "Uncle Mike, over here!"  
  
He got into the car and they drove west in silence for several hours. As they approached the Orlando airport Jack finally turned to him and asked how the job had gone.  
  
"Perfectly," replied Sark, "Though I must say that all the wines offered at my hotel were quite substandard. Schwartz's contact list is in the bag and Sydney's new friends in Minsk are dead. I never took your daughter to be a gold digger, Agent Bristow. Then again you always had trouble keeping track of her. One of these days I suggest investing in a leash for her."  
  
Jack's face hardened ever so slightly; he gave Sark a withering glance and said tightly, "The money is in your Montreal safety deposit box."  
  
Sark laughed, "I wouldn't want to criticize your much vaunted parenting skills, but have you ever thought that there might be less underhanded ways of looking out for her? I suppose I'll be meeting you in Athens on the 10th."  
  
"Don't be late."  
  
"I never am."  
  
As Sark walked away he started to hum his favorite tune. 

V pobede velikikh idey kommunizma  
Mi vidim gryadutshee nashey strani,  
I krasnomu znameni slavnoy otchizni  
Mi budem vsegda bezzavetno verni!

**_fin_**

A/N: _Gimn__ Sovetskovo Soyuza_ or _Hymn of the Soviet Union_ was the national anthem of the USSR. I've used some Russian and some English lyrics (the English lyrics are ones you can sing not a direct translation of the Russian ones) here because consistency is for pussies. If you want to make more sense of the whole and listen to the tune I highly recommend you visit David's National Anthem Reference Page. 


End file.
